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Genealogical data acquisition and request

1989; GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.12759/hsr.14.1989.3.30-34

0172-6404

Marion Selz-LauriÞre, Pierre-Olivier Flavigny, Pierre Jane,

Natural Language Processing Techniques

Different fields of human sciences (for example: ethnology, history, de mography...) are concerned with the establishment of genealogical data basis. It is generally a hard task; if, on one hand, the fact that the resear cher has to his disposal a rich body of archives material (certificates of birth, marriages, deaths, deeds executed by a notary, parochial registers...) is a guarantee per se, on the other hand it dramatically widens the possi bilities of errors. The main problem is to be sure that such and such person has already been registered; the problem becomes crucial when we deal with marriages; because of the possibility of the multiple alliances, we have to be very cautious about the reduplication of every person's identi fication. Of course, the problem of the name is here primordial: have we the same person married twice? or have we two different persons with an equivalent name? We have achieved a set of data processing tools which helps the resear cher to make that work.Our programs fit to researcher who has already a good knowledge of his data: he is able to make unambiguous the identi fication of every person by a good knowledge of the studied population or by a minute inspection of available documents. The first package we describe is a guide for genealogical data acquisi tion; it is a DBASE III program. It is called ?SAIS1E-GEN?. The second one permits requests in that base; it is a Turbo-Pascal pro gram. It is inspired by REFLEX from Borland. We have called it ?1NTER-GEN?. They run on a PC computer; the interface between the first and the second one is very simple: it is just necessary to add some informations (number of records, name and dimension of each variable) at the top of each file created by SA1S1E-GEN so that they can be handle by INTER-GEN.